Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the launch of the Seagate NAS HDD 8TB, the world's highest-capacity drive optimized for RAID, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) and server storage. These reliable, scalable drives address the ever-growing data challenges for the Small- and Medium-sized Businesses (SMB), Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and creative professional segments.

The Seagate NAS HDD 8TB is the largest NAS optimized drive on the market. That means businesses will require fewer drives-and subsequently fewer expensive enclosures-to meet their data storage needs. The new 8TB drives are designed for tower enclosures with one to eight bays, delivering up to 64TB in a single eight-bay desktop form factor. This high storage density gives small business the high capacity and flexibility to address the data challenges on the immediate horizon while preparing for the future."Our customers are finding themselves under more pressure than ever as the volume of data they need to deal with continues to increase dramatically," said David Chiang, general manager of business division, QNAP Systems, Inc. "QNAP is focused on delivering scalable and reliable NAS solutions to address these needs, giving users the confidence that their information is secure and available. The new Seagate NAS HDD 8TB will offer professionals a huge capacity with which to easily manage this growing amount of data."

Data volumes continue to increase at an astounding rate, with IDC's Digital Universe Study forecasting that the world's annual data creation will increase by ten-fold between 2013 and 2020 to 4.4 zettabytes. Seagate's own research[ii] has revealed that SMBs in particular are choosing NAS solutions over other storage technologies such as storage area networks (SAN) and direct attached storage (DAS) to help manage this looming surge in data. Of the people who preferred NAS, 18% do so because of price, 16% for ease-of-use and 10% for quality.

"Delivering the flexibility and access that users require is a constant challenge, especially in a world where there are more users with more devices expecting seamless access and flawless performance," said Chad Chiang, product manager at Synology Inc, a leading NAS solution provider. "NAS solutions are rapidly becoming the storage medium of choice for organizations with limited IT resources that need a quick and easy solution to manage their data. The new Seagate 8TB drives will give our customers incredible capacity to handle the huge volumes of data their users are creating and sharing."

The new Seagate NAS 8TB HDD is optimized for a diverse set of NAS use cases including backup and disaster recovery, print and file servers, multimedia storage, archiving, file sharing and virtualization. In addition, industry-leading NAS manufacturers including ASUSTOR, QNAP, Synology and Thecus have qualified the NAS HDD 8TB for compatibility in a number of their products.

The new drive includes:

• 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, & 8TB capacities
• Suitability for 1- to 8-bay enclosures
• 180TB/year Workload Rate Limit (WRL)-the largest WRL for this category of NAS drive, offering businesses peace of mind that heavy workloads can be easily managed
• MTBF of 1M hour-demonstrating mature robustness of the drive family
• Three-Year Limited Warranty-peace of mind from a reliable NAS HDD
• One-of-kind optional three-year Rescue Data Recovery service to protect against potential data loss

Availability
The new Seagate NAS HDD 8TB has shipped to select customers, with wide-scale availability at the end of the current quarter.